Boston University

Real or “false”? Dental prosthetics are getting so good even patients may not be able to tell the difference after a while. (Credit: David Shankbone/Wikimedia Commons.) When it comes to crowns, dental professionals—and patients—have several choices, according to this website. Options include precious metals, porcelain fused to metal (PFM), and ceramics, and dental professionals…

Background image: Molten glass. Credit: Michael Germann; Dreamstime.com. Peter and I thought it would be fun to share our five favorite posts from 2012. Finding that choosing only five was nigh impossible, I decided to sort my picks into three categories, which instantly grew my budget to 15 stories! External forces Advances in science and…

Credit: NETL. I flinch when I hear the term “clean coal” because there is more than a little hyperbole imbedded in it. But, cleaner coal seems to me to be a more reasonable goal and I have heard a lot of reasonable presentations on how major strides in that direction could be made, especially ones based…

These beautiful ceramic roasters by artist Robbie Lobell continue an ancient tradition of using pottery for cooking. Lobell intends for her roasters to be used, “I make my flameware pots to encourage the ideas of using handmade objects to prepare and present locally grown vegetables, fruits and meats from our gardens, barnyards and nearby farms.”…

Stanford University researchers have discovered a new way to ‘decorate’ nanowires with coatings of metal oxide and noble metal nanoparticles that greatly improve surface area. Credit: Stanford Nanocharacterization Lab. Check ’em out: High-strength silk protein scaffolds for bone repair (PNAS) Biomaterials for bone tissue regeneration represent a major focus of orthopedic research. However, only a handful…

Those engineering electronic devices always have had to factor in the use of special materials that can conduct heat away from crucial components. Bulk copper’s thermal conductivity is pretty good at around 400 watts per meter per kelvin, but this ability decreases as the copper approaches film-size dimensions. Diamond has long been known to have…